This is a book that I made called Untold - Five tales and their secret pasts. It was my Final Major Project at University, and the brief was completely open to ourselves. For this project I wanted to challenge the conventions of the book, trying to push the boundaries of what a book could be, and how it could function, without losing the basic nature and mechanics of the traditional book. By taking advantage of French-fold binding I was able to create five different original binding techniques to conceal information, and to allow me to have two differing narratives displayed alongside each other in the same book, on the very same pages. The book focuses on five different fairy tales (The Three Little Pigs, Hansel & Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella) with the accompanying text providing a commentary on the history and evolution of each tale, detailing all the gruesome, gory and sometimes just plain disturbing elements of the original tales.

The cover is a hand-made cloth bound hard cover, featuring a letterpressed title. The main title Untold is printed in white ink, whereas the subtitle Five tales and their secret pasts is embossed - a link to the hidden content within the book. It was all completely hand bound by myself, something which I thought would be crucial for me to be able to get all of the pages working as I needed them to. Each tale features a custom hand-drawn title page, and each one uses its own unique method of concealing its accompanying information. The tales also have decorative drop-caps that were adapted from Minion Pro Bold Caps, to match the body copy. There are also two independent contents pages within the same page - one for each part of the book.

A big part of this project is the tactile nature of the book - the mechanics of the pages; switching between the regular section of the book and the concealed section. Originally I thought that this would be hard to convey over the internet, but I thought that if I made a video of the book in action, showing each method and interaction that it would go some way to doing it justice. You can find this video on the right, and if you keep scrolling there are some photos of the book.